Feith Heeling
The New Yorker profiles neo-con policy architect and anti-war bête noire Doug Feith in a prickly (what did you expect?) series of interviews. Most of it consists of the interviewer trying to wrangle out of Feith an admission that he f-ed up Iraq, or trying to catch him taking credit for prescience he didn't really have. Still, it's interesting stuff.
This caught my eye. Feith (born in 1953) reflects on his developing world-view as a Jewish American during the Vietnam anti-war movement years.
Another thing that seemed interesting to me was that the parallels between George W. Bush's war presidency and Abraham Lincoln's seemed to be something that occurred to Feith only when the interviewer brought it up. Are we really that smart? My blog friends and I were discussing that two years ago. I have to wonder. Not trying to serve anyone, just saying. Like when George Will finally starts to see Iraq's insurgency in terms of Algeria's. A good month or so after my blog buddies and I took a tour over that ground.
Doesn't mean anything. You might be smarter than half the men who've ever been president, and you'd still be a lousy president. But I think I could do better at George Will's job than he does these days.
This caught my eye. Feith (born in 1953) reflects on his developing world-view as a Jewish American during the Vietnam anti-war movement years.
“What I was hearing from the antiwar movement, with which I had a fair amount of sympathy ... were thoughts about how the world works, how war is not the answer. I mean, the idea that we could have peace no matter what anybody else in the world does didn’t make sense to me. It’s a solipsism. When I took all these nice-sounding ideas and compared it to my own little personal ‘Cogito, ergo sum,’ which was my understanding that my family got wiped out by Hitler, and that all this stuff about working things out—well, talking to Hitler to resolve the problem didn’t make any sense to me. The kind of people who put bumper stickers on their car that declare that ‘war is not the answer,’ are they making a serious comment? What’s the answer to Pearl Harbor? What’s the answer to the Holocaust?”
Another thing that seemed interesting to me was that the parallels between George W. Bush's war presidency and Abraham Lincoln's seemed to be something that occurred to Feith only when the interviewer brought it up. Are we really that smart? My blog friends and I were discussing that two years ago. I have to wonder. Not trying to serve anyone, just saying. Like when George Will finally starts to see Iraq's insurgency in terms of Algeria's. A good month or so after my blog buddies and I took a tour over that ground.
Doesn't mean anything. You might be smarter than half the men who've ever been president, and you'd still be a lousy president. But I think I could do better at George Will's job than he does these days.
